painting the good and lovely things he saw among the
tulip-fields and waterways, the cattle and the wind-mills of his own
native Holland before the gray-clad millions of the Kaiser burst into
the low countries with fire and sword.

Then comes the miracle of his transformation; the idyllic is thrust
aside by the hideous reality; beauty is drowned in a bestial orgy of
force; and in place of the passive painter arises the fiery preacher;
the brush is discarded for the pencil, and the pencil in his hands
becomes an avenging sword, because by it millions of people have been
aroused to a clear-cut realization of the fact that the issue of this
war is no less than Slavery and Autocracy versus Freedom and Democracy.

The very first of his war cartoons indicated the prophetic vision of
the man, and gave the first evidence of his inspiration and genius. It
is called "Christendom after Twenty Centuries" and shows a bowed and
weeping figure crouching under the sword and lash. It was drawn on that
fateful day August 1st, 1914. The intensity of emotion shown in this
drawing revealed his power for the first time. To Raemaekers himself it
came as a vision and a summons. The landscape painter disappeared, and
in his place arose a champion of civilization, throbbing with sublime
rage and pity, clothed with authority, and invested with a weapon more
powerful than the ruthlessness it indicts.

When the stories of the Belgian horror began to circulate in Holland,
Raemaekers, like the rest of the humane world, refused to credit them.
His own mother was German; he had spent many happy years in Germany; he
knew the German peasant as a kindly and happy, if rather stupid fellow;
it was incredible that such men could have done the awful things
alleged. But the tales persisted, and although the evidence of the
wracked and broken refugees who poured into his country by tens of
thousands seemed irrefutable, he could not believe it, and readily
seized upon the common supposition that the terrible stories were the
product of the imagination of an overwrought and panic-stricken people.
At length he could remain in doubt no longer, and quietly slipped over
the frontier to verify for himself the truth or falsehood of the
accusations that had already made Germany guilty of the foulest crimes
ever perpetrated in the name of war since the dawn of civilization.

What he actually saw with his own eyes he does not tell. But a hundred
of his early cartoons b